OCZ's new Octane series is the first solid state drive to squeeze one full terabyte of storage into a 2.5-inch drive, but the awesome doesn't stop there. It has read speeds of up to 560MB/s and write speeds of 400MB/s, versus top competitors who are at 500MB/s read and 315MB/s write.

The Octane series has a new controller called Everest (made by Indilinx, which OCZ recently acquired). They have built a bunch of new proprietary algorithms into it and they make a lot of bold claims, including nearly doubling NAND life, which should give it a whopping ten-year lifespan under average use (which they said was pretty vigorous). It's supposed to retain most of that out-of-the-box speed even after it's mostly full and has been though many write/erase cycles, which has been a major sticking point for SSDs in the past. There are no compression, file-type, or file-size limitations, which means you should get the same speed no matter what you're working with.

These are consumer oriented drives, but OCZ will soon be fleshing out the Octane line with enterprise drives and pro drives which will push performance even further. At present there are SATA 3.0 drives and SATA 2.0 drives, with the 3.0's being the real spec monsters. They have Indilinx's "fast boot" technology, which supposedly decreases their boot time by 50-percent versus existing SSDs. You'll see OEM versions of these drives arriving soon in some of LG's upcoming ultrabooks. They are available in sizes starting at 120GB and going all the way up to 1TB. In the 3.0 line a 120GB will run you about $156, 240GB for $288, 480GB for $528, and 1TB for $1,100. That's a very nice price per gigabyte, and this is the only one you can get in the 1TB form factor. They'll start shipping toward the end of next week and they'll be available at a major retailers (NewEgg, Amazon, Tiger Direct, etc).

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Obviously, there are a lot of large claims here that need to tested (and we intend to), but if the Octane series can live up to them then I'd expect this to make major waves in the evolving SSD landscape. OCZ's previous series of drives won our last SSD smackdown—let's see if they can go back-to-back.